"I think better of our legal system"

 So... the sitting U.S. president is actively trying to subvert the outcome of a free and fair election, just because he lost. We all know this. Yet, in my circles at least, we aren't really talking about it. A conspiracy of silence is maintained, though it sometimes—as this morning—breaks down, when Trump and his goons send up some particularly alarming trial balloon of authoritarianism, and we can't help but mention it to one another.

Why the hesitation to speak? We tell ourselves, it is because silence is the best strategic choice. To acknowledge Trump's bogus assertions, by contrast—even for purposes of refuting them—only gives them more oxygen. It lends credence to the idea that there is some real controversy as to the outcome of the election still, or that Trump has some realistic path to hold onto power. 

He doesn't: not so long as any semblance of democracy and the rule of law hold in this country. And surely the only way to maintain the binding force of those norms—the legality and underlying sense of legitimacy that binds a polity—is to act and speak under all circumstances as if those norms do in fact hold. 

Okay... But the mind can't help but snag at that horrifying thought: what if they don't hold? If norms and an underlying belief in the legitimacy of the law and the Constitution to operate impartially are the only things sparing us, what do we do when a president does not believe in any of those things? What do we do when millions of people follow him in his disbelief?

People don't seem to think Trump's bid to create alternative slates of electors in key states through false claims of fraud is likely to succeed. The news coverage all says the chances of this happening are "remote." The New York Times the other day suggested that, if this were to happen, the public outcry would be swift and punishing. 

Okay, true again... But when has swift and punishing public outcry done anything at all to stop Trump or to sway the minds of his devotees? And the suspicion begins to grow... why is the chance of something like this happening so "remote"? Is it remote because it would be unlawful, would require subverting any number of checks-and-balances set up to safeguard the process and ensure a fair outcome, and across multiple states simultaneously? Yes, probably.

Still, one senses in oneself and one's peers a certain feeling that the chances have to be remote, because... because... the scenario in which Trump's strategy succeeds is just too horrendous to contemplate. To see him finally and justly defeated at the polls, and then to watch our democratic institutions crumble after the fact—just because people are too partisan and cowardly to stand up to one insatiable bullying sociopath... it's a thousand times worse than if we had actually lost the election. 

There is something infinitely more hideous about losing something that was already in one's grasp than about not possessing in the first place. This is the reason for the age-old wisdom about not counting one's chickens—of setting one's eye on only the lowest of expectations—as a strategy for emotional resilience. 

As the cruel Dr. Sloper explains the principle to himself in James' Washington Square, reflecting on his hopes for his offspring: "I expect nothing [...] so that if she gives me a surprise, it will be all clear gain.  If she doesn’t, it will be no loss." 

Or, as Ivan Denisovich observes, in Solzhenitsyn's famous novel of gulag life: it is best not to count the years one has spent in Siberia: because even if one reaches the end of one's ten-year sentence, one never knows if they might decide to add another fifteen.

All throughout the 2020 election, I applied this stern wisdom. I absolutely refused to get my hopes up. Hope, after all—in addition to being a thing with feathers—is an instrument of torture. 

There is a reason the Greek writers maintained hope was the only thing left in Pandora's box, after evil had been unleashed upon the world. It was not—as modern retellings of the story tend to emphasize—because hope is needed as a positive force to counterbalance the negative force of despair. 

No, the Greek mythicists were more cynical than that. As Mircea Eliade tells it, the real point of the image—to the ancient mind—was that hope (false hope, at that) was the only thing goading humans on to strive, in the face of the universal evil that actually characterized the world. 

In the play often attributed to Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, this is also the charge laid against the captive Titan: that he has allegedly increased the suffering of mortals by teaching them to question and buck against the irresistible tide of fate. 

It was in something of this spirit that, leading up to the vote, I resolved to bow before the yoke. I would not dare to hope. Then, if we won, the joy would be all "clear gain," in Dr. Sloper's phrase. 

And yet, election week and the weeks that followed made it impossible not to allow this force to pass one's emotional threshold. Biden won! Unequivocally! As the results came in, the victory became only more certain. He won, that is, if we are still a Constitutional democracy that operates through an electoral college and is bound by law. 

And that is precisely the premiss Trump is seeking to call into question. Right now, that Constitutional democracy is a barrier to Trump staying in power. And so he is doing what all tyrants and usurpers do: he is trying to destroy what stands in his path.  

We can only feel in this moment very much like Ivan Denisovich. We are trapped in the maw of a delusive and paranoid and incomprehensible intelligence, whose laws are inscrutable and who may at the final hour choose to snatch from our palm what hope of release we had. 

As the country is roiled by catastrophe on a vast canvas—a pandemic that is spreading with unheard-of rapidity and has claimed more than a quarter of a million lives-- we are not permitted to focus on this problem, because we are simultaneously made to live in the brain of one solipsistic sociopath who cannot accept defeat. 

We, a nation of diverse millions with a storied history, an old and steady democracy, the world's leading universities and its largest economy, somehow cannot get rid of this one odious, discredited, illiterate, untalented man. 

The law of Trump's brain is as remorseless, cunning, and indifferent to human suffering as that which governs Solzhenitsyn's camp—that much is clear. The question before us is whether our country's actual law—the law founded in the Constitution and the statutes created by Congress—will prove stronger than Trump's law. 

I think so... but I can't shake the feeling that I might be as naive in this belief as the captain in Ivan Denisovich's work gang. This character—a newcomer to the camp—has only recently been classed as a political criminal and suspected spy after an honorable service as a Soviet liaison to the British navy. Unlike the more hardened prisoners, he remains loyal to the regime and is convinced that he will eventually be vindicated. 

When the others around him joke about the arbitrariness of his twenty-five-year sentence and the false charges against him, he therefore bristles: "Sorry, I don't go along with all that destructive liberal criticism. I think better of our legal system." (Shonk trans.)

We too—my friends and colleagues, and myself—are all bristling at the insinuation that Trump's strategy for circumventing and overthrowing democracy might succeed. We, like the captain, think better of our legal system than that. But... surely we do so with greater reason on our side? He, after all, was confined to a Stalinist gulag. Whereas we are living in one of the world's leading democracies. 

Time will tell. We are coming to the end of a four year stretch in Trump's America. Our hearts fill with hope at the prospect of the coming freedom. But if Trump's strategy to subvert democracy succeeds, we may—like Ivan Denisovich—suddenly discover that the sentence has been extended.